= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Alejandro1 comments on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (211)
According to him, the ancient heliocentric model of Aristarchus was clearly superior in simplicity and predictive power to the geocentric models of Ptolemy and others, and was abandoned for irrational reasons (religiously or ideologically motivated). From what I understand, the mainstream academic position is that, analyzed in context and without hindsight, the ancient rejection of the heliocentric theory was quite reasonable. Previous discussion in Less Wrong.
I think it is better to say that the rejection could have been reasonable, that we cannot rule out that possibility, not that we can rule out the possibility that it was not reasonable.
My interpretation is that Hipparchus was geocentric, perhaps for good reason, and everyone else was geocentric the bad reason that Hipparchus had data, and data was high status, not because they were convinced by the data. In any event, his data does not rule out the distances Archimedes proposes in the Sand Reckoner, probably following Aristarchus. But I don't think it is even really established that Hipparchus was geocentric, just that Ptolemy said so.
Update: Nope, history is bullshit. Hipparchus was not geocentric. Maybe Ptolemy said he was, but what did he know? Other ancient sources say that he refused to pick sides, not knowing how to distinguish the hypotheses. At the very least this shows that the heliocentric hypothesis was alive and well. Asking why they discarded it is wrong question. Frankly, I'm with Russo: the heliocentric hypothesis was standard.